


silver white winters

by ice_connoisseur



Series: edelweiss [1]
Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: AU after episode four, Brienne and Tyrion finding family, Childbirth, Daenerys Targaryen Is Not a Mad Queen, F/M, Pod being his awesome Podly self, Unplanned Pregnancy, but turned out there were a lot of other things I wanted to get fixed first, season 8 fix-it, will eventually be a j/b fix-it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-07
Updated: 2019-08-07
Packaged: 2020-08-11 08:36:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20150746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ice_connoisseur/pseuds/ice_connoisseur
Summary: “I would understand,” Brienne continues haltingly, “if you required my departure.   In light of…this.  You are home, and safe, especially with your sister close by.  And I know it would be a…difficult…situation.”“For my sworn sword to birth Jaime Lannister’s bastard child within Winterfell’s walls, you mean?” says Sansa quietly, evenly.Brienne flinches. “Yes.”





	silver white winters

**Author's Note:**

> I genuinely have no idea what’s going on here. I have watched approximately 10 episodes of Game of Thrones ever, read maybe three of the books, have not written anything longer than a couple of thousand words in close to a decade, and generally avoid kidfic even in fandoms where there are actual canon children.
> 
> So here, have my 20,000 words and counting, season eight AU-ish fix-it, complete with bonus babies. I know. 
> 
> We’re pretty much sticking with canon through to the close of episode four and then diverging in a myriad of ways both minor and major from there. 
> 
> Full disclosure: this is a fix-it in every sense of the word, but Jaime doesn’t actually appear in this part. I very much took the in-for-a-penny-in-for-a-pound approach and decided fuck it, if I’m fixing one thing then I’m fixing the lot, so it quickly became apparent that this was not going to be brief. There was an obvious divide however, so part one is from Brienne’s POV and part two will be from Jaime’s. 
> 
> Likewise, although I’ve tagged for pregnancy/kidfic and that is a significant part of the story, it’s not the main focus throughout, so if you’ve come here hoping for lots of fluff and baby cuddles you will probably be disappointed, sorry. There is a moderately graphic childbirth scene but neither mother nor child are at risk at any point.
> 
> On the other hand, here you will find much in the way of gratuitous Pod being awesome and Brienne-Tyrion friendship, plus some measure of Arya-the-Explorer, Queen in the North Sansa, and competent not-dark Daenerys. Plus an unchecked tendacy to write in run on sentences and abuse the humble comma.
> 
> Anyway. I’ll stop rambling now. Please enjoy my nonsense.

The news comes slowly, in fits and starts, ravens depositing short letters in various hands to be patched together by the recipients, piecemeal.

The people of Kings Landing surrendered. The Queen did not. Parts of the Red Keep fell in a haze of wildfire, but the city yet stands. A man who may or may not have been Jaime Lannister was last seen disappearing into the tunnels, shortly before the walls started falling in.

Sansa delivers this last piece of news in person and in private.

“There is no love lost between Starks and Lannisters,” she says softly into the silence of Brienne’s response, as if the families were merely unhappy acquaintances rather than opposing sides of a war that has ripped apart a continent, “but I know you and he were…close. And he came through for us, in the end.”

“Thank you my lady,” Brienne says, for want of anything better; what _is_ there to say? She is blank, numb, caught somewhere between denial and grief and the suffocating, smouldering anger that has dogged her every moment since he rode away, that _this_ should be the end he chose to take. 

Sansa smiles at her briefly, empty and sad, and excuses herself. Brienne stays at the window, staring out unseeing and desperately, _determinedly_ unthinking, until a gentle tap at the door breaks through the quiet. 

Pod’s head appears at her firm “_Enter_,” and one look at his face is enough to confirm that someone – Sansa, assumedly, though she supposes it is too optimistic to hope that this most recent shred of gossip isn’t already wending its way across the castle – has already told him. She is distantly, abstractedly aware of the wetness on her cheeks, and there is no hope that Pod doesn’t see it too, and know its cause. The cold detachment in her chest shakes, cracks, for the first time. She can’t face it, not yet, she isn’t ready, can’t broach the maelstrom of emotion that is surely waiting for her. But her defences are weak and crumbling and it won’t take more than a few kind words from her well-meaning squire for them to shatter altogether, send her tumbling into the abyss that lurks within, patiently confident in its own inevitability.

But of course she should know by now to give Pod more credit than that. 

“I was hoping you would spar with me, Ser,” he says. “I’ve not had much chance to train, these last few days.”

She blinks once, and then again, thrown, but Pod doesn’t say anything more, just stands there in the doorway, patient and kind and somehow always knowing just what she needs before she knows it herself. 

And right now what she needs more than anything is to spend the next few hours working herself into oblivious exhaustion in the training yard, to have to think of nothing beyond the end her own sword. Pod is good enough to make her work for it, at least occasionally, these days, and their sparring draws in a small crowd of onlookers, knights and squires alike, until the afternoon has turned into something of an impromptu tourney. By the evening her body is too spent to give her mind any foothold, and she falls into bed with the walls once more safely fortified and reinforced. 

* * *

And so day follows day; mornings spent with Sansa and afternoons with Pod, an even split that ensures both mental and physical exhaustion. As a young girl she had avoided facing the demons of her own inadequacies (_too tall too dim too ugly)_ by pouring every fibre of her being into her training, channelling her childhood miseries and hurts into sheer physical power and burning through it with determined relish, and she does the same again now, silencing the noise in her head and in her heart by pounding her body into near collapse on a daily basis. 

She doesn’t allow herself time to think, to feel, to wonder. She knows Sansa is receiving daily updates from Lord Snow, from Tyrion Lannister, possibly even from the Dragon Queen herself, and knows she would almost certainly share the news with her, if she were to ask. But Brienne doesn’t ask; she doesn’t _need _the hows and whens and wheres. She knows enough.

But what she wants has never mattered for most things in her life, and never more so than when in regard to Jaime Lannister, and so the letter arrives some ten days after the news first broke.

_Ser, _the cramped scrawl reads,

_Forgive me the presumption of writing, but I felt that you of all people deserve to know the facts, such as they are, uncoloured by gossip and rumour._

_We found my sister’s body in the throne room. She had been stabbed; I think death must have been almost instantaneous. Maester Qyburn’s body was nearby, along with a guttered torch and my brother’s sword. There is no other sign of Jaime, nor any indication of where he may have gone from there, but we know he didn’t leave the Red Keep above ground. _

_Many of the corridors and tunnels through the centre of the Keep were damaged or completely collapsed when a wildfire cache blew. Thank the Seven it was the only one in the city to go up. _

A slight gap on the page, and the script that follows is messier, as if the writer’s hand had faltered with the inscription.

_So much of it is inaccessible; I fear we may never retrieve him._

_I am sorry._

The letter is signed simply _Tyrion_, without the official seal of either House Lannister or the Queen’s Hand, and somehow this personal touch is more damming than anything the letter itself contains. 

Brienne has always known her own limits, known that she could spend years in court and never learn the art of careful scheming and political wordplay, that delicate game of balance and subtlety, saying one thing and meaning quite another, but even she can read between the lines here to understand what Tyrion hasn’t written down. 

It just isn’t _fair_. Five years and change since that day in the baths at Harrenhal and she has never forgotten a single moment of his confession there, the look on his face and the break in his voice as he confessed his greatest deed and most infamous sin. Did Cersei know, as she laid her plans and made her orders, had she ever known of the choice her brother-lover had made once before? Could she have guessed what her actions might drive him to do? Had she had time to realise, at the end? For Jaime’s sake Brienne hopes not, hopes that final, terrible act was as swift and unseen as it had been the first time. 

Brienne can’t face her own feelings still, shies away from the roiling mess of love and anger and loss that lives behind her breastbone and keeps it claws buried deep and bloody in her flesh, but she can mourn for his. No matter what he did to her, what oaths he made and discarded, he deserved more than this; one final act of betrayal and a silent, lonely death. 

It just isn’t _fair._

* * *

Weeks pass. There is an edge of the surreal around everything, as though no one dares look too closely at their victory (for it is a victory, that at least has been agreed on) for fear of scaring it away entirely. And there is more immediate work at hand, rebuilding and repairing, replenishing stores, the basic foundations of daily life. It is good, hard, honest work, and Brienne retreats into it entirely. 

No one speaks to her about Jaime. His presence at Winterfell and his actions during the Long Night had earnt him a certain grudging respect; his subsequent departure had generated scorn, and more than one pitying look in her direction, until the news from Kings Landing had started to filter through. This last was apparently one change of allegiance too far, and the Northerners cope with these contradictory pictures of his character by mostly ignoring any mention of him altogether. 

Pod tries, a few times, with an endearing awkwardness that is somehow better than any eloquent speech or heartfelt eulogy would have been. His attempts always end the same way, with the two of them sitting in companionable silence like so many of their nights on the long road North, peaceful in its own comfortingly familiar way. He is a quiet, constant presence by her side, and for the rest of their lives Brienne will never know how to thank him for ensuring she is never alone in those long early days of the new age. 

The first month she doesn’t even notice that her courses haven’t come. They’ve been erratic for years now, her body battered from strains both physical and mental. As the second month passes, however, the thought starts to cross her mind, flickering, easily spooked if she pays it too much attention, and altogether easier to avoid. 

It is too much. Too much fear and chance and regret and hope, too much _everything_ on top of all the other things she is so determinedly _not thinking about_; she doesn’t even begin to have the words for this. 

But as the weeks go by and still her courses don’t come she slowly accepts that she is going to have to find them. 

* * *

“You’re sure?” Sansa asks into the silence that follows Brienne’s awkward, stilted delivery.

Brienne keeps her eyes fixed on a point just above and to the left of Sansa’s shoulder and determinedly ignores the flush she can feel working up her neck and onto her cheeks. “As sure as I can be without consulting a maester.”

The silence stretches. Lady Sansa’s eyes never leave Brienne’s face, her expression shuttered, processing. 

“I would understand,” Brienne continues haltingly, giving in to an uncharacteristic need to fill the quiet between them, “if you required my departure. In light of…this. You are home and safe, especially with your sister close by. And I know it would be a…difficult…situation.”

Sansa raises one eyebrow, arch. “For my sworn sword to birth Jaime Lannister’s bastard child within Winterfell’s walls, you mean?”

Brienne flinches. “Yes.”

“And where would you go?”

“South, I suppose,” says Brienne carefully, sensing a trap but unable to see where it is coming from. “Tarth, eventually, if the seas are kind.”

“Is that what you want to do? Return to your home?”

Brienne pauses, floundering. It had been so long since she has thought about what she wants to do over what she needs to; even longer since anyone has actually _asked_ her.

“I don’t know, my lady,” she admits at last, exhausted, defeated. She is just so _tired_. “I haven’t really thought it through yet.”

Sansa nods once almost to herself, as if Brienne has confirmed a suspicion she hadn’t be certain of before, and for the first time a small smile breaks over her face. 

“You have been a loyal friend to me, Brienne, and a good one. One day your duties to your people will take you from my side, and though I dread it for my own sake, when the time comes I will release you gladly from any and all vows you have made to me. But only when you wish it. In the meantime you are as welcome here as you have ever been. Winterfell is your home, for as long as you will have us. Yours and any child’s of your line.”

“Thank you my lady,” croaks Brienne, resolutely swallowing down the sudden lump in her throat. “That means…that is very kind of you.”

Sansa’s smile widens; she looks, for a moment, like the young woman she might have been, freed from the weight of all she has lived through. 

“It will be a joy to have a child around the castle again,” she says simply, and then, “though, given its parentage, I suppose we should prepare for our current peace to be very greatly disturbed.”

Brienne chokes on a noise that is half-laugh, half sob, at once both surprised and overcome by her own relief. She had been so prepared to leave she hadn’t realised how much she wanted to stay, how very unready she is to leave this place and these people behind. There are good memories still to be found here alongside the bad, and she recoils instinctively from the prospect of leaving to face alone those who can have no idea or understanding of what she has seen and survived. 

Sansa stands and moves to the door, apparently sensing Brienne’s need to retreat and regain control over her emotions, but she pauses on the threshold, looking for the first time slightly uncertain.

“Brienne,” she begins, hesitating, “please understand I say this as a friend, not as your Lady. This isn’t an order. But I think…please consider, if you haven’t already, writing to Lord Tyrion. He would wish to know.”

And then she leaves in a swish of skirts, gently clicking the door shut behind her.

* * *

Brienne does, in fact, start no fewer than five letters to Tyrion over the following days. But finding the words proves beyond her and each one ends up crumpled and discarded into her fire. If Pod is alarmed by her erratic behaviour he does not let on. 

It’s too much. She can barely wrap her own mind around it; the idea of sharing with a relative stranger, no matter how close his interest, is unfathomable. Her body is mostly unchanged as yet, and sometimes a whole day can pass in which she completely forgets. It’s not that she is unhappy, exactly, it is more that she is so very many different things all at once that it is mostly easier to not think about any of them at all, and allow herself to instead concentrate on the stark practicalities that fill the days in a slowly recovering Winterfell. Somehow she knows that writing her news down, committing it to parchment and releasing it into the world, will make it far more terrifyingly real and impossible to ignore than even speaking to Lady Sansa did. 

And in the end it doesn’t matter, and her reward for her indecision is the prospect of telling Tyrion face to face instead. A letter from the South informs them that the victorious Queen is heading north once more and wishes for her Northern allies to meet her at Moat Cailin for a formal council. Even Brienne can see the diplomacy at play here, both parties travelling an almost-equal distance to meet on neutral ground where no lord rules and no atrocities have been recently committed. 

She just hopes it stays that way. 

And that, somehow, is still an altogether more preferable thing to worry about than her own impending fecundity.

* * *

“I think he will be glad, Ser,” says Pod apropos of nothing, as they ride south, some three days from the journey’s end. “About the babe, I mean.”

Brienne turns to stare at him, eyebrows raised in surprise; it is the first time Pod has directly addressed her condition since the day he found her vomiting into a chamber pot and she had been forced to tell him before he dragged a maester to her rooms. 

“Lord Tyrion, I mean,” Pod elaborates, a little defensive. “He likes children. And he likes you. I think. So.”

Brienne laughs at the boy’s obvious discomfort, surprising them both. “You don’t have to try and reassure me, Pod.”

He shrugs, awkward but unapologetic, and it _is_ heartening, somehow, all the same. She doesn’t know Tyrion, not really, but Pod does, had served him as well and faithfully as he does her; she forgets that, more often than not. They don’t discuss it again, but she holds his confidence close like a talisman, a sliver of blind faith that is quite unlike her. 

* * *

They arrive in full fanfare, neither court willing to be seen as lesser in the eyes of the other, and join with the established camp of Southerners already spread across the flatlands that surround the ruined keep. There are formal greetings and exchanges that Brienne mostly stays back for, one hand always on her sword more out of habit than any real concern. Tyrion is there, of course, but other than a brief moment when their eyes meet across Daenerys and Sansa’s clasped hands they do not communicate. 

Instead he comes to find her, on the evening of the second day at the end of many hours of debate and negotiations on all sides. Brienne has stolen a moment for herself, secure in the knowledge the Lady Sansa is sharing dinner with her sister and brothers, as safe as she will ever be outside of Winterfell’s walls. The Northern camp is quiet for the moment; from her position, sitting on the grass near her tent with her back resting against the ruins of a low stone wall, Brienne can hear the murmur of voices and occasional burst of laughter, but it is distant and indistinct. She closes her eyes and tilts her face up to the watery sun that has been determinedly shining down on them since their arrival, and feels, for a moment, more at peace than she has done in years. Just briefly she can almost pretend that she’s sitting in the gardens behind the Keep on Tarth, long ago and far away when she was a different person who never thought to wonder the price growing up would demand from her.

So it is at this moment, of course, that she hears footsteps and a voice saying, apologetically, “Ser, I am disturbing you.”

Brienne’s eyes fly open; it takes her a moment to focus on the figure standing before her, somewhat flustered at being caught so unawares.

Sitting, her face is almost level with Tyrion’s own. She had seen a fair amount of him in Winterfell, before the Long Night, and grown somewhat familiar with reading him; frustration, worry, bouts of anger in the War Room as they planned their final stand, but also the affection and fondness with which he had regarded Pod, the stark naked relief when he had first seen Jaime safe and well after the battle, his wicked humour at the feast, playing his ridiculous game. 

She has never seen him thus. His eyes are marked by deep shadows and his face has aged a decade in the space of months, etched with lines that were never there before. For the first time in their acquaintance, Brienne realises the last remaining Lannister looks _tired._

“Lord Tyrion,” she greets him, feeling suddenly tongue-tied and wrong-footed – why, _why_ didn’t she write, as Sansa had suggested? At least then she could have been spared having to find the words under his sharp gaze, spared seeing his reaction to them.

He waves her formalities away with a weary hand. “Just Tyrion, please. You of all people have earnt that much.”

Something in his manner and tone of voice gives him away; Brienne pauses for a moment, considering, relieved. “Lady Sansa told you?” she guesses. 

“She…alluded,” Tyrion allows. “And Pod is really, truly terrible at keeping secrets. He doesn’t even have to say anything, his face is far too expressive.”

His eyes track over her as he speaks and Brienne shifts uncomfortably at his scrutiny, feeling suddenly exposed in her tunic and hose, without her plate to shield her. She herself is acutely aware of the physical changes to her body but as yet they do not appear to be obvious enough to draw comment from anyone else. 

“I should have written and told you myself,” she says, more to break his gaze than anything. “I…you were good enough to write to me.”

Tyrion shrugs off her apologies with practiced ease. “You owe me nothing, Ser. I might be presumptuous and call us friends, but in reality we barely know each other.” 

“I know you are one of the few people whose opinion Lady Sansa values,” counters Brienne quietly. “I know you were kind to her when few were, though it cost you, and would have been far easier to be cruel. And with Podrick, too.” She pauses for a moment, looking away over the field of tents and milling horses. “I know you loved your brother, and he you.”

Tyrion says nothing for a moment, eyes fixed on hers. “I think I could say all the same things about you, too,” he says at last.

Brienne shuts her eyes; the bleak sincerity in his face is unbearable. 

“I think we may be the only two souls in the world who only ever loved him for who he was, rather than who we thought he should be,” Tyrion goes on, and when Brienne opens her eyes she is unsurprised to see silent tears tracking down his face.

“Your sister…” she began, but Tyrion shakes her off impatiently.

“As children, yes, maybe,” he allows. “But it’s been years since Jaime’s reality matched up to the expectations she had for him.”

They remain in heavy silence for a time – and_ this_ is why she should have written, for how can anything between the two of them be at ease, when they share the weight of so much combined grief? There is no stable ground between them. 

When Tyrion finally speaks again his voice is hesitant, uncertain in a way Brienne has never heard from the self-assured man before. 

“I know I have no right to ask this,” he begins, with the air of one who is picking his words with considerable care. “But…well, to be blunt, between the wars and my sister’s vendettas, I have no family left. I was never particularly close to most of them, but it is strange all the same, to find one’s self so exposed in the world.”

He trails off, looking uncertain again, but Brienne thinks she sees what he is trying to say, what he is asking and offering; more than that, sees how it might be a way to salvage something between them.

“My mother died when I was very small,” she offers. “And my brother when I was a child. It was only ever my father and I, after that; we had no cousins or aunts and uncles. When it comes to blood relations I have as little to offer as you. I would be glad to know you better, and for my child to have the same honour.”

The smile that breaks out over Tyrion’s face is transformational; he looks suddenly younger, lighter.

“I will spoil him,” he assures her, and though his eyes are still tired there is merriness in them now as well. “If he is to be raised amongst dour Starks and Northerners then that will be my duty as his Lannister kin.”

“He might be a she,” Brienne points out, for no reason other than being around Jaime’s brother makes her feel uncharacteristically contrary. 

Tyrion waves away her protest with a grin. “Semantics,” he disregards, flopping down on the grass besides her and stretching out with a contented groan. “He, she, irregardless. I’ll be there to see them win their first tourney.”

She laughs at that, feeling suddenly more at ease than she can remember being in weeks. Years. Tyrion is buoyant, his spirits so clearly lifted by the readiness of her agreement that she can’t help but respond in kind. Pod joins them, with a timing so perfect Brienne suspects he has been waiting just out of sight to avoid disturbing their conversation, and it should feel wrong, she is sure, the three of them together serving to highlight the absence of the fourth, but instead it is somehow peaceful, to sit and drink and talk around the small fire.

Jaime is there, of course, an ever-present ghost shadowing their thoughts and words. It is impossible to be otherwise. Tyrion and Brienne loved him, love him still, and Pod has served them both, moved from Tyrion’s protection to Brienne’s by Jaime’s uncharacteristically insightful hand. Yet he has woven the three of them together so neatly and completely that Brienne finds his absence is somehow easier to bear in their shared company. She has attended wakes before, for people she’s liked and people she hasn’t, and on the whole has found them to be arduous, uncomfortable affairs, too much alcohol and emotion, never the happiest of bedfellows. This is something different, gentler and quieter and all the more sincere for it. 

It sets a pattern and a precedence from there. Pod and Brienne often dine together anyway, but now Tyrion joins them more nights than not, whenever Daenerys seems willing to spare him, and Brienne starts to realise that she truly enjoys his company. She’s not sure she believes half the stories he tells, of the things he’s seen on his travels or read on his return home, and sometimes his wit is a little too caustic or sharp for her own tastes, but he is clever and funny and Pod so obviously loves and respects him. Over time she realises she likes him for all these reasons and more, and not just for the sake of Jaime’s memory.

And there are times, when Pod has taken his leave and returned to his tent or to wherever the squires and younger knights are gathering that night, when it is just the two of them and conversation turns more towards the personal. He’s careful in the subjects he speaks of, skirting neatly around any mention of Cersei and only very occasionally alluding to their father. Tommen and Myrcella come up a few times, but Joffery’s name never passes his uncle’s lips. He mostly tells her stories from his childhood, the games Jaime indulged him in, the pony he trained him, and later memories too, though it’s obvious in the telling that the brothers lost their closeness as adults, and Brienne finds herself mourning anew, that they should have made such progress in reclaiming it only to lose any chance. 

She repays with her own tales in kind. It quickly becomes apparent that though Tyrion knows the gist of it, Jaime had lacked either the time or the inclination to share their travels in any great detail, and somewhat to her own surprise Brienne finds that she _does_ want to tell of them, at least to Tyrion. It takes two evenings to cover the whole of their journey together, from Riverrun to Kings Landing by way of the bear pit and Vago Hoat’s blade, but Tyrion is an avid listener and they both of them love the subject matter too much to resent the indulgence. 

There is a short pause when she eventually finishes, and then Tyrion says, with a studied nonchalance, “I think it is a very good job you and Cersei never crossed paths. She could never bear sharing Jaime’s attention with anyone; it was one of the reasons she hated me so much, at least to start with.”

It is the first and last time Brienne ever hears the dead Queen’s name pass her brother’s lips, and from the look on his face she knows not to draw attention to it.

“We did meet, once,” she says carefully instead, watching the embers their small fire is sending up into the night. How far away that day feels now. And how few people there are left to remember it. “At King Joffery’s wedding. She was very…astute…in our only conversation. It was a short meeting, at least, and then everything that happened…happened, and Jaime gave me what I needed to go after Sansa.”

“A sword, armour, and Pod,” recites Tyrion gaily, but there is a dark edge to his voice, Cersei still plainly on his mind. “He was never one for subtlety, my brother. Though I suppose he must have been relieved, in a way.”

Brienne glances at him, brow furrowed. 

“You wouldn’t have left Kings Landing while Sansa remained,” Tyrion says with an easy shrug. It isn’t a question but Brienne agrees anyway. “And you would not have survived your loyalty. My sister would have seen to that, and Jaime would have known it. The confusion after that assassination bought him time, and Sansa’s flight ensured your willingness.”

“We both swore an oath to Lady Catelyn; arming me and sending me after Sansa was his way of fulfilling it,” 

“I’m sure that was part of it,” Tyrion acquiesces. “But believe me, he’d have found some other excuse if not. He didn’t leap to your aid in a bear pit only to see you fall at the hands of our dear sister. And she would have killed you, I can promise you that. She’d have tried to control you, first, but when that didn’t work…”

He doesn’t need to finish. 

“Though sending Pod with you was a stroke of genius I wouldn’t have given him credit for,” Tyrion continues after a moment in a lighter voice; he is, Brienne suddenly realises, quite drunk, but for tonight at least seems inclined more to the merry than the maudlin. 

“I didn’t appreciate the value of that gift for far too long,” says Brienne with a small smile, glad to steer the conversation back onto more solid ground. “I was hurt, and grieving Lady Catelyn, and worrying for Sansa. Pod has been far more loyal to me than I deserved, especially in the beginning.”

“I’ll drink to that that,” agrees Tyrion with a ready laugh, and starts to regale her with tales from Pod’s days as his steward, as cheered and open as she has ever seen him. 

* * *

The summons from the Dragon Queen comes two days after that particular conversation. Brienne has been aware, of course, of the political wrangling that has been ongoing since their arrival, but she has had little to do with the actual mechanics of it beyond standing at Sansa’s shoulder during meetings and offering an opinion when her Lady asks, usually in private once the Southerners have departed for the day. 

So she is unsure what to expect when the message reaches her, and even more wrong-footed when she enters the Queen’s pavilion to find it empty of anyone apart from Tyrion and Daenerys herself; no sign of Sansa, nor any other member of the Northern contingent.

“Lord Tyrion has informed me of your news,” Daenerys says levelly, forgoing formal greetings. Brienne nods once in acknowledgement, trying to ignore Tyrion’s awkward shifting next to where his Queen is standing, serene.

“I had already intended to grant Ser Jaime a public pardon, in light of the true circumstances surrounding my father’s death, not to mention his more recent actions in the North and in King’s Landing. I had thought it no more than a gesture, and a comfort for his brother, but this changes things somewhat.”

“I don’t understand, Your Grace,” Brienne frowns. 

“I’m referring to the matter of Casterly Rock.”

Brienne blinks, genuinely thrown. “I’m sorry, Your Grace, I still don’t follow.”

“Her Grace is considering offering you regency of the Rock, to hold until your child is ready to inherit” explains Tyrion flatly. His voice is carefully expressionless but there is obvious displeasure on his face. 

“Lord Tyrion disagrees with me on the matter,” adds Daenerys unnecessarily, a small smile playing about her lips; Brienne gets the impression that Tyrion’s disagreement has been vehement, and the Queen, for whatever reason, is amused by his reaction. “And so I thought it best to approach things head on.”

“I need you to understand, Lady Brienne, my disagreement in no way reflects on my opinion of you, as a person or as a leader. Quite the opposite,” Tyrion says in a rush, before Brienne can so much as open her mouth. She swallows her first words and instead turns to him enquiringly. She has spent enough evenings in his company by now to know the best way to draw out his conversation is to say nothing and let him fill the silence; in some ways he really is very much like his brother.

Tyrion closes his eyes briefly, looking suddenly as old and tired as he had on that first night, when he had approached her and been so unsure of his welcome. “Lady Brienne. In the last few years you have proven yourself to be a noble, just woman, again and again. You have upheld vows above and beyond what any reasonable person would have expected. You saved Lady Sansa. You stood unbowed against the dead, fought bravely and well. You have saved my brother’s life, more than once. And in return…in return you have been ridiculed and defamed, threatened. Your friendship with my brother has at various points cost you your health, your safety, and your good name, if not all three at once.”

She opens her mouth to protest at that but Tyrion silences her with a gesture and ploughs on. 

“Casterly Rock is a shell. My sister has drained it of both men and minerals. It will take years to build it back up and recover it to even a shadow of its former glory; more than years, it is the work of a lifetime. You are an honourable woman, and I cannot bear the thought of you taking on this burden out of some misplaced sense of duty you may feel towards either my brother or your child. You have sacrificed too much for my family already; I do not think it is right or fair that we should ask you to do so yet again.”

A short silence follows Tyrion’s words. A curious feeling is coiled in Brienne’s stomach; it takes her a moment to realise she is trying desperately not to laugh out loud. Tyrion looks so _wretched_, standing there, as if he fears his words have inflicted some mortal blow. As if she cares about some distant castle, unseen and unthought of until this moment.

“The choice is yours, Lady Brienne,” Daenerys prompts.

Brienne shakes herself mentally and focuses. This is politics at its worst; for all that she is inclined to like the Dragon Queen, already respects her for her battle prowess and the honour to which she holds her own vows, she does not – cannot – entirely trust her. Time with Lady Sansa has taught her that much. This is an offered gift – unlooked for and unwanted, but a gift all the same – and it must be declined with all the grace her childhood septa never managed to instil.

“Thank you, your Grace. Lord Tyrion. I…I appreciate your honesty. And I know what an honour you show me in asking. But I have a home, and a hall, though I hope my father’s good health will continue for many years to come. I am of Tarth, like my father before me, and my child after. I have always known it would be my duty to return there one day and see to its care, and provide it with an heir to carry on after me. I can’t set that aside.” 

Daenerys nods once, unsurprised and apparently not displeased. “I understand,” she says, short but not unkind, her mind obviously already moving on to other matters. “You do your father great credit. I won’t need you again this evening, Lord Tyrion; I will see you in the morning.”

And with that unspoken dismissal she turns and leaves the tent.

* * *

They walk back to the Northern camp in silence; only when they are settled around Brienne’s small fire and Tyrion has a goblet safely in hand does he speak.

“I’m sorry. I should have discussed this with you before. I wasn’t expecting her to bring it up so soon. I don’t want you to feel like you were forced to make such a decision so quickly - if you would like more time to think things through then you need only say.”

Brienne’s good humour is fading quickly in the face of Tyrion’s obvious anguish on the matter. There is something more at play here, she thinks, than just his guilt about usurping her perceived claim. She suspects it can be traced back to the obviously complicated relationship he had shared with his father, and to a lesser degree his brother, but she knows he won’t speak on it with her even if she presses.

She shakes her head instead. “There is nothing to think on. And it’s not as if this child is even legitimate, the claim would be tenuous at best. I meant what I said; I have my responsibilities to my father and to Tarth. I couldn’t turn my back on them even if I wanted to.”

“But you don’t want to, either,” says Tyrion shrewdly. 

Brienne sighs. “No. No, I don’t. Tarth is my home; it’s what I was raised for. And…and, this way, I can have it without compromising anything else.”

She flushes slightly at her own candour but Tyrion is unfazed.

“Your people will accept a baseborn child as your heir?” he inquires, sceptical.

Brienne shrugs. “We’re not as stuffy at home as you mainlanders are; not quite Dorne’s standards, maybe, but looser than most. I will name him of Tarth, and there will be a few raised eyebrows, but we don’t have the same courtly politics to contend with. And it’s probably easier…”

She trails off, hating herself for where the sentence was going to end, but Tyrion follows it through anyway.

“Easier that Jaime isn’t around, to foist a Lannister name on his offspring?” he observes wryly, ever pragmatic. 

Brienne shakes her head sharply, dashing away the angry tears that have gathered in embarrassment. “It isn’t fair!” she bursts out, desperately trying to find words for the emotions she has been wrestling with, the one that eclipses all the other worries and doubts she has concerning her pregnancy. “I don’t…I’m not _ashamed. _He was a good man, and an honourable one, in his own way.”

“He left you,” Tyrion points out quietly. 

“And that is between him and I, and me alone now,” counters Brienne swiftly. She cannot – will not – open that can of worms, no more ready to face it now than she was the day he left. “He still deserves to be remembered without such taint. Or at least for the good, and not only the bad. I shouldn’t fear the repercussions of passing his name on to his child.”

“Is that something you’d considered?” asks Tyrion, surprised.

Brienne shakes her head at once. “I suspect it to be a boy, and Maester Wolkan was in agreement. But I can’t…I _won’t_ name him for his father. That’s not a fair weight to places on any child’s shoulders.”

Tyrion nods in ready agreement. “No matter what bright future we build from here, people can and will always be cruel. There’s no need to make it easier for them.”

“But I want _something_,” stresses Brienne, calmer now but still overcome by the relief of finally being able to talk it through. “He’ll be raised in the North, at least to begin with, and named heir to Tarth. Jaime should have something. But I can’t see what, or how, without risking adverse impact on his future.” 

Tyrion sips his wine, brow creased in a furrow. “Jaime always swore Arthur Dayne was the greatest knight he had ever seen,” he says thoughtfully. “And it was Ser Arthur who knighted him, after the defeat of the Kingswood Brotherhood.”

“It’s not a common name now,” hedges Brienne. “Old fashioned, really.”

“But not so unusual as to invite comment,” counters Tyrion. “And there’s no other Lannister connection to it I can think of, besides the obvious. And even then, I doubt there are many left alive who would remember a young squire’s hero worship from over twenty years ago, if they ever cared about it at all.” 

Brienne turns the name over in her mind. It hadn’t occurred to her that there might be such a straightforward solution to her conflicting desires, a way of permanently linking her child to his father without compromising his own future.

Tyrion, however, is obviously focusing on a different part of their conversation, for after a moment’s quiet he says, “I can’t claim to know what Jaime was thinking, in King’s Landing. I never understood the tie he had to our sister; I’m not sure anyone could. And I don’t know what the two of you shared, or what words he spoke when he left you,”

Brienne flushes hot at that; she had long suspected that her tears in the courtyard at Winterfell had not gone unwitnessed, and something in Tyrion’s expression makes her think he at least knows a little. He presses on, ignoring her discomfort with studied determination.

“But I know he cared for you. He told me as much himself. And I think…I _know…_he would have claimed your child, if he could. Legitimised him, if you allowed it.”

“I wouldn’t have denied him that,” Brienne says with quiet firmness. Jaime had rarely spoken of his other children to her, and never alluded to them being any more than his nephews and niece, at least in her company. But she wasn’t blind, she had seen how much their forced distance had hurt him and their deaths wounded him. Outside of the physical Brienne isn’t a quick learner, but she is a thorough one, and if there is one thing in life she has learnt absolutely it is the shape and form of Jaime Lannister’s moral code. To have been unable to claim his own kin must have wounded him unforgivably. She couldn’t have done that to him.

“You are a good woman, Brienne of Tarth,” Tyrion says in tones of dawning wonderment. “What on earth did my brother ever do to deserve you?”

It is obviously meant as no more than a passing jest, but it is too close to the words Jaime himself spoke the night he left, and Brienne is suddenly, blindingly, furious.

“It was never a case of _deserve_,” she snaps

Tyrion stiffens, sitting bolt upright and placing his cup carefully to one side. “I apologise, Lady Brienne,” he says softly. “I spoke poorly.”

Brienne allows him the apology but the anger lingers, simmering beneath her skin. It’s misdirected, some distant part of herself knows, but Jaime is no longer there to rage at in person, and she hates him little, for that, for denying her that catharsis. 

“It’s a common trait, amongst Lannisters,” Tyrion continues, his voice still cautious, quiet, the sort of voice you would use to calm a skittish horse. “We’re forever saying things we don’t mean, or not saying things we do.”

“Do you have things you regret saying to him?” Brienne asks, partly to deflect and partly truly curious, despite herself.

Tyrion is nodding before she has even finished speaking. “Absolutely. And so many things I regret never saying to him at all. I thought when we left Winterfell…” His voice cracks, falters, but he visibly swallows and ploughs on. “When we left Winterfell, I thought it was only a temporary parting. He had seemed…happier, and more at peace, there, than I had seen him in years. I thought he would stay, and I could come back, and we would have _time_, afterwards. To sort it all out.”

“Then he fooled us both,” says Brienne coldly. 

Tyrion shakes his head, his eyes dark with sorrow. “Maybe. But not completely, I don’t think. Jaime was never that good a liar.”

Brienne’s immediate impulse is to argue, fight back against his defeated sadness, her first instinct when wounded always to lash out and harm the other party in return. But something in Tyrion’s open grief stays her tongue. There’s an honesty between them now, an understanding borne out of their combined sorrows, one they had danced around but not quite reached on that first night when Tyrion had been so uncertain of his welcome. 

“He chose to leave,” she says instead, taking refuge in the solid undeniable fact that has twisted her grief into anger so many times in the recent months.

“And he may have chosen to return,” Tyrion counters. “If he’d had the chance. We know he left the Throne Room, assumedly under his own steam. There’s no way of knowing what his intentions were after that.”

Brienne closes her eyes and takes a deep, steadying breath, centring herself. “I can’t think like that,” she admits. “The what-if’s would drive me mad.”

“I find them comforting, in their own way. But how dull life would be, if we all thought the same.”

“I think I hate him, some days,” she confesses. Tyrion’s eyes are steady, kind; he might be the only other soul in all of Westeros who is able to understand, and she needs that, suddenly, needs to know she isn’t alone in this. “For…for leaving, or not the leaving itself, but the way he did it. And for dying without giving me a chance to understand, without trying to explain. He’s left me with doubts and questions that I’m never going to be able to answer, for myself or…or for our child. And there’s no fixing that.”

Her hand drifts as she speaks, to settle on the subtle curve of her belly that is slowly starting to show under her tunic. It’s not something she does often, and usually only in the privacy of her own chambers, carefully feeling and exploring this new shape to her body. But there’s a strange comfort in it now, akin to the feel of Oathkeeper’s familiar hilt under her palm, and she’s beyond the point of denying herself something just because a Lannister’s too-knowing eyes are on her. 

“I’m so sorry, for everything he’s put you through. For everything he still puts you through.”

But Brienne shakes her head. “Don’t be. Please. I…I’m angry, and hurt, and so many other things, but I’m not sure I’m sorry, even now.”

Would it have been worse, she wonders, later that night, alone in her bedroll save for the bastard babe he has left wriggling in her belly. Would it have been worse to have lost him without having known him so completely? She loved him, regardless, would have mourned completely him no matter what, and so maybe it is better this way, to know what it is she has lost because she at least got to have it, if only for a little while. 

And, more than that, he has saved her again, one last time, however inadvertently. In life he gifted her with her most precious possessions, armour and a sword to defend the freedom of others, and Pod, to aid her in her quest. And in death he has left her own freedom, albeit of a different kind; an heir for her line. She knows her place and her duty, and though Tarth has been a far and distant concern these past few years she has always known that if she were to return and take her father’s place when the time comes, as he so wishes, one day an heir would be required and damn the misery a marriage would doubtless ensue. 

So no, she can’t be sorry, no matter how much pain and anger and humiliation she still feels when she thinks of him. But even that is changing, dulling. Maybe it’s inevitable, the steady passage of days and months dulling the raw and jagged edges of her hurts, or maybe it’s the time she’s spent with Tyrion these last few weeks, being able to talk and remember Jaime for his best as well as his worst with one of the only other people left alive who really knew and loved him. Maybe it’s a bit of both. 

She lies in the dark for a time, letting the silence cocoon her as she tries to carefully probe through her own feelings, the ones she determinedly buried deep and shied away from since the day the raven came; before that even, since the day he rode away to die and left her to watch him do it. The tears form unbidden and unwanted, but finally, finally, for the first time she does not try to stop them from falling.

* * *

They stay nearly a full moon at the Moat, hammering out a future from the tattered remnants of their civilisation. The North secedes in the first round of debates; Sansa is resolute, and Daenerys is unsurprised. They have discussed this already, planned the hows and whens, Brienne thinks, watching them debate in before the gathered Lords. This is merely a performance for the rest of the Kingdoms to accept. Bran Stark pledges himself to the rebuilding of the Wall, the understanding of its magicks and makings to be the work of his lifetime. Jon Snow, who will take no other name nor bear no further command, stands as his companion and protector on the long journey ahead. 

There is a ceremony, the last day before their planned departure, on the fields below the keep. Daenerys and Sansa are crowned in the watery spring sunlight, sitting side by side beneath the ruins of the great castle. They make pledges to each other and to their peoples, impressive rhetoric that Brienne nonetheless knows is borne out of weeks of work and careful negotiation. If nothing else these two Queens are at least bonded in their understanding each other’s desire to learn from the mistakes of her forebears. 

The coronations are followed by speeches, long and involved announcements to formalise the raft of appointments and divvy up those keeps and castles that have been left vacant by the Wars. Jaime’s official pardon is slipped in carefully about half way through, so that there is little time for more than a raised murmur and a few sideways glances at Brienne where she stands behind Sansa’s throne. Oathkeeper is strapped firmly to her side and her plate still just about fits, sufficient to hide her changing shape a little longer, but she knows the rumours have spread even so. 

“We are still Seven Kingdoms,” Daenerys’ voice carries through the crowd; things are winding down at last. “United by ties of friendship and honour. There is not a person yet living who has not suffered due to the bloodshed of recent times, and it is our duty to see that such atrocities do not come again.”

“To that end,” picks up Sansa, “We have agreed that our courts should meet here each year, along with representatives from any great house who wishes to send one. These meetings will allow for open and frank discussion between all parties, and also provide opportunity for competitions and tourneys and other such games, and thus we will maintain the bonds of both honour and friendship into our futures.”

Wild cheers greet their words. Cynically Brienne can’t help but wonder if some of those cheering now are not the same people who cheered Robert Baratheon, his cuckoo children, the mad Queen. They don’t really care for the honour or duty of the person ruling over them, they care only that their bellies are full and their own families safe. But then maybe that is why they need leaders who do value such things, to care about them on their behalf. 

The crowds are already starting to disperse, heading back to the camps where the feasting will soon be underway. Sansa and Daenerys walk, heads bowed together in conversation, officially Queen in the North and Queen in the South, towards the pavilion where their own meal is laid out. A long table, like the one Joffrey had died at on his wedding day, except this time Brienne will be sitting at it herself, next to Tyrion if she’s lucky, and likely Arya too, the family and trusted friends of the two Queens cementing their own ties. 

An insistent prod in her abdomen breaks through Brienne’s wandering thoughts. She’s been feeling strange flutterings and shiftings for a while now, but this is the first time it’s been so marked; were it not for her barely-fitting plate Brienne suspects she could have felt it even through her tunic. 

The prods continue for a few moments more, persistent, and Brienne stands there, frozen in something like wonder, until Pod, noticing her absence as the rest of the group walks on, doubles back. 

“Ser?” he asks, concern in his voice.

Brienne shakes herself firmly out of her reverie and back into the present. “It’s nothing, Pod. I’m fine.”

And for the first time in a long while, she thinks she might actually mean it.

* * *

It is a depleted group that sets out North from Moat Cailin the following day. Bran had declared his need to head to the Citadel before journeying to the Wall, and has taken Jon Snow with him. Arya too had turned south, though her destination was less clear, even to herself. Brienne had watched her, as unobtrusively as she was able, since she had returned from the south once more and reunited with her sister. Her sword may have been sworn to Lady Sansa – Queen Sansa, now – but Brienne never forgets that she had vowed to protect both of Lady Catelyn’s daughters. It is just _easier_, with Sansa. Arya has no need for physical protection, of course, and though Brienne rather suspects the younger Stark deals with her emotional hurts in much the way Brienne herself does, pouring them into physical action, Brienne is currently of no use to her there. They had tried to spar, just once, at the Moat, and Arya’s frustration at Brienne’s new physical limitations had, at the time, been almost comical. 

So no, Brienne is not sad to see Arya go. She needs time and space away from Winterfell to mend her hurts, much the same way Sansa needs the opposite. She will return, when she is ready.

The ride home also serves as a blunt reminder of her own changing situation. Coming south had felt no different from the many other journeys she has made across Westeros, sword at her hip and Pod by her side; the return trip is a different beast altogether. She does not bother with the plate again after that last night at Moat Cailin, her own unique knightly vanity finally surrendering to sheer practicality. Her stomach seems to be expanding on an almost daily basis, as if determined to take advantage of the lack of constraining armour. It changes her gait, her balance, even her seat on her horse, and she hates to feel so alien in the body that has never before betrayed her. In her lowest moments she wonders if this is recompense, that in return for finding friendship with Tyrion and making an uneasy peace with Jaime’s memory she must lose control of the weapon she has spent a lifetime honing. 

She knows she is being ridiculous, which doesn’t make it any easier to accept, and all in all it is nothing but unmitigated relief when Winterfell finally appears on the horizon, home again at last.

* * *

The last weeks of her pregnancy are by far the hardest. She finally grows too big to fit into even the most forgiving mail, and her body finds new and ever-more interesting places to ache and complain. Sansa does not ask her to step down from her duties, thank the Seven, but Brienne knows her limits, knows she would be of little use against any physical threat now, and she will not risk her lady with anyone less than the best. She instead concentrates on the daily running of the Queensgard and wider armies, going over recruitment numbers and training schedules and spending long hours with Sansa debating the changes they want to make and those they are being forced into by necessity, but eventually even those more mundane tasks tip her into easy exhaustion. 

In the end it is almost a relief when her labour pains start, late one evening. She paces her chambers for a time, back and forth, the movement far easier than staying still. Her body knows pain and discomfort as well as any knight’s does; more so than many, after the past few days and weeks, and at least now, finally, it is in pursuit of something tangible.

She vomits into the chamber pot, once and then again, the meagre dinner she had barely picked over with Pod earlier in the evening rebelling against her. During breaks between the pains she contemplates what to do with the foul contents of the pot. On the one hand keeping it in the room is out of the question, but on the other she daren’t leave; the pains are increasing both in frequency and intensity and she suddenly can’t stand the idea of being caught unawares outside the safe four walls of her own chambers, the prospect of being seen so vulnerable too inexplicably mortifying to face. 

For the first time a twinge of panic sets in, and she is suddenly coldly aware of how alone she is. She has missed Jaime daily for nearly nine moons now, missed his touch and his teasing and his wilful presence in every corner of her life - some days it is no more than an uncomfortable nagging ache at the back of her mind, others an acute jagged wound that she can barely breath around – but every one of those days pales in comparison to the loss and abandonment she feels in this moment, knowing that the one person she would have wanted nearby is so utterly beyond her reach.

Another pain distracts her from the topic for a moment, but it has barely passed before she feels a wet warm gush between her legs, soaking the small clothes and breeches she wears under the loose tunic she had at one point intended to sleep in.

She struggles out of the ruined fabric, a mortified flush heating her face, suddenly thankful again to be alone, and so it is at exactly that moment that someone taps sharply at the door.

“Ser Brienne?” a voice calls, and Brienne bites back a curse, because of course it’s Pod, Pod who has followed her with unwavering faith for so long, who knows her as well as anyone still living, who had watched her with quiet concern in his eyes mere hours earlier when they had sat quietly together for supper and she had done little more than push the food around her plate, all appetite gone. “Are you alright Ser?”

“Yes, Pod, I-”

And what she was going to say next Brienne never knows. Another pain builds, worse than the earlier ones, and she nearly bites her own tongue to avoid groaning aloud. 

It doesn’t matter. Next thing she knows, Pod is rattling the door handle and slipping quickly into the room. He takes it all in with a single glance, eyes moving swiftly from the vomit-filled chamber pot to the ruined breeches she still has clutched in one hand, the other wrapped so tightly around the back of a chair that her knuckles are strained white against the dark wood. He looks last of all at her, his knight and commanding officer standing in nothing but a loose tunic, face flushed and sweaty, the unknown fluid drying sticky and cold down her legs. 

“Ah,” he breathes with a small grin. “I did wonder, after you didn’t eat at dinner. How long?”

“Since just after you left,” Brienne admits grudgingly, taking advantage of the waning pain to release her death grip on the chair and move further back into the room, towards the bed. “Pod, I…”

“Let me sort that for you,” Pod interrupts smartly, coming forward to take the chamber pot and ignoring her protests. “Then I’ll go and wake Maester Wolkan,”

“No,” says Brienne sharply, suddenly focused. She doesn’t like the Maester, with his rheumy eyes and clammy hands and bloody Bolton past, has avoided him quietly and determinedly since her first and only exam the earliest days of her pregnancy. The idea of him here, now, seeing her thus, is unbearable. “No, not him,”

“Someone else then?” presses Pod determinedly. “You’ll need a midwife, my lady. Ser.”

Brienne nods begrudgingly – stupid, _stupid_, why hadn’t she thought to speak to someone, one of the army of female servants who roamed Winterfell? How had something so basic slipped her mind? “Yes, fine. You’re right, of course. Just not the maester, not unless he’s needed.”

Pod nods again, still looking, of all things, a little amused by the proceedings, and slips from the room clutching the covered chamber pot to his front. 

Brienne resumes her pacing in his absence. The pains come twice more, definitely quicker and _definitely_ stronger, before he returns, followed closely by a plump, middle-aged women and a younger girl in a shapeless shift Brienne vaguely recognises from the kitchens.

“Good evening Ser,” the older woman greets her pleasantly, as if they were meeting in the yard or hallways. “I’m Leona, and this is my youngest girl Yvlis. Young Pod says you could do with a friendly hand. I’m no maester, but I’ve five babes myself and my second will give me a third grandbaby within another moon, and I’ve delivered a fair few more besides.”

Brienne tries to smile and return the greeting in kind, but another pain distracts her. Her pacing has taken her too far from the bed or chair and she finds she has nothing to grip on to; she falters, reaching, but it’s too far, and then suddenly Pod is in front of her, catching her hand in his and steering her easily to perch on the edge of the bed with a cheerful “there you go.”

“Thank you,” she breathes as the pain fades again, looking from Pod’s dearly familiar face to Leona’s kind open smile.

Leona tsks her thanks away easily, sending her silent daughter to stock the fire, but Pod, for the first time, looks at her anxiously.

“I can wake some of the maids, if Mistress Leona needs more help?” he asks hesitantly, looking from Brienne to Leona and back. “And then stay away, as long as there are people with you.”

Leona shrugs easily. “More hands are always useful things at a birthing, but I’ve no mind for who they’re attached to.”

Brienne hesitates. The fire is leaping to attention under Yvlis’ hands and for the first time in what feels like days she is feeling calm again, soothed by the quiet competence exuded by the goodwife and Pod’s familiar, earnest face. She can’t bear the thought of the room filling with the noise of unknown voices and strange people.

“I would like it if you stayed, Pod,” she says at last. “If that’s not too much to ask of you.”

“Not at all, Ser,” Pod grins, helping her back to her suddenly shaky feet. “You can use me as a crutch, if the walking helps. I’ll consider it payback for the horses outside the Vale.”

* * *

Time leaps and crawls by after that. She paces, leaning more and more on Pod for support until she finally concedes defeat and retreats to the bed. Leona pokes and prods her abdomen for some minutes, hmming and hawing under her breath, and twice makes her lie back and subjects her to an exam that would once have been the most brutally intrusive and uncomfortable moment of her life to date, if not for the hours that have preceded it. The midwife keeps up a continual cheerful patter throughout, on subjects ranging from the weather to her children to the plans for the upcoming feast day, all interspaced with moments of “good job, ser, you’re doing beautifully,” and “not long now my dear, not long now.” 

Evidently at some point near dawn this last one becomes true. Leona tries to persuade Brienne to lie back once more, but the pain and the pressure is too great; Brienne shakes her head, teeth locked grimly because if she opens them to speak she _knows_ she will scream instead. Leona is unfazed, and between them they shift Brienne onto all fours instead, and then Pod, dear, loyal Pod, who hasn’t flinched or complained or shied away once, no matter how much she has leaned on him or what noises she has made or how hard she has gripped his shoulder and arms, comes in front of her and takes one hand in his, drawing her gaze up, supporting her upper body so that she can kneel on the mattress, legs parted. 

“There Ser,” he says, as calm and unruffled as Brienne has ever known him, “You heard her, nearly done now. Lean on me if it helps, I can take it.”

It does help, somewhat, but more than that Brienne suddenly realises that this is something her body instinctively knows and understands, as intuitively as it knows how to wield sword and shield, her strange unfeminine form somehow still recognising this most female of endeavours and responding in kind.

She bears down, face burrowed into Pod’s neck, focusing on Leona’s steady instruction and Pod’s continual low murmurs of encouragement. For a moment there is nothing but blinding, blistering pain, and then a sudden and complete absence of it that is almost more shocking.

And then a reedy, mewling cry.

Brienne rocks back, caught somewhere between shock and exhaustion; Pod catches her by the shoulders and turns her so she can lean instead against the pillows at the head of the bed, panting.

And then Leona is in front of her, smiling broadly and dropping a bundle of squirming, indignantly wailing cloth into her arms. 

“A girl, Ser. You’ve a daughter.”

Brienne stares down at the strange red-faced creature, blinks once, twice, a third time. Time stops altogether, the world itself shrunk down to contain only the two of them. She’s barely aware of Leona still poking and prodding; Pod by her side might as well have been at the other end of the castle.

“Hello,” she murmurs, raising a suddenly shaking hand to touch the small face. And then, still a little dazed, processing Leona’s words properly for the first time, “I’m sorry I thought you were a boy.”

“That’s not your only surprise of the night,” says Leona from where she’s finally stopped poking around at Brienne’s belly. “It’s twins, my lady.”

Brienne blinks up at her. “What,” she begins, neither brain nor body keeping up. Leona smiles at her gently. 

“I can feel a second babe Ser.”

Brienne’s head is still swimming, exhaustion and emotion crowding in from every direction. Yvlis starts towards her, arms outstretched as if to lift the bundle from her arms, but Brienne shies away, instinctively shielding the infant. The girl pauses, glancing uncertainly between her mother and Brienne, but Leona just clucks her tongue again.

“You need to put her down my lady, our work’s not done yet,”

Brienne starts to shake her head, clutching the baby to her chest, because she’s only just _got _her, she can’t just pass her off again, not to some anonymous stranger, but she can already feel a fresh pain building and she can’t _keep _her either…

And then Pod is there by her side, just like always, a gentle smile on his face and a hand on her shoulder. “Please, ser?” he asks, waiting for her short nod of consent before reaching forward and lifting the babe from her arms, settling her in the crook of his elbow with a practiced ease that she is going to have to question him about, later. Much later. 

Ylvis steps forwards again to take Pod’s place ready to support her while he moves away, though whether by accident or intent he stays completely in her line of sight, and she loves him all the more for it, for somehow always instinctively understanding what she never knows how to verbalise. 

It’s over quickly, the second time. Whether the shock and adrenaline are muting things, or whether her body is just acclimatised now, but either way, a short time later it is over.

“Is it alright?” Brienne pants, letting Ylvis shift her once more onto the bed. The piercing wail that had announced the first child’s arrival is completely absent and for a moment she feels a cold dread start to settle in her chest.

“She’s right as rain,” Leona assures her cheerfully from where she’s bent over the baby at the other end of the bed. “The spit of her sister, just a little more patient about things.” As she speaks she flicks, once, twice, three times at the tiny foot Brienne can just make out over the edge of the rumpled blankets, and at last a reedy cry fills the air.

“There,” smiles Leonora, scooping her up and depositing her gently into Brienne’s waiting arms. “See?”

And Brienne does see. She runs her eyes over every inch of the child, from the squashed face to her tiny wrinkled toes. Pod, once again knowing what she needs before she does, slips quietly back to her side and perches on the edge of the bed. With a small amount of manoeuvring they rearrange things until Brienne has them both, one in each arm, and she’s not sure how she’s ever going to look away from one unless it’s to turn her gaze on the other.

“They’re magnificent, Ser,” whispers Pod hoarsely, his voice for the first time all night something other than confidently unflappable; he sounds instead on the verge of tears, though Brienne can’t bring herself to look up at him to check.

“Yes,” she agrees quietly instead.

“They’ll be hungry, soon enough,” prompts Leona gently. “That’ll help your membranes come away, and then we can get you cleaned up. And here,” she continues, leaning over to tie a short length of ribbon around the first baby’s wrist, “so we know who is who. They’re as alike as peas.”

Brienne passes the second babe back to Pod, who proceeds to look as utterly besotted with her as he had with her sister, while she awkwardly shucks her ruined tunic and holds the child to her breast, following Leona’s steady instruction. They swap and repeat the process with both babies, during which Brienne is briefly, distantly aware of another rush of discomfort and warm sticky fluid between her legs followed by Leonora’s “ah” of satisfaction. Then Ylvis helps her up while Leona quickly and expertly strips and changes the bed and fetches a fresh tunic for her, and then it’s back into bed, a sleeping babe in each arm, and despite the exhaustion tugging her doggedly down Brienne can’t bring herself to do anything more than stare down in sheer wonder at what she has somehow produced.

* * *

She does sleep, of course, to be woken by hungry cries and an aching chest. She feeds one, then the other, and then herself, taking gratefully the light dish a maid brings up for her. 

Pod returns with Leona as she finishes eating; the midwife checks over first Brienne and then both babies with a practiced hand before taking her leaving, waving off Brienne’s heartfelt thanks with an easy smile, but Pod loiters, his eyes fixed on the sleeping children.

“Do you have names for them?” he asks into the quiet of the room. 

It’s the same question Brienne’s been turning over in her own mind since she woke.

“Arta, for the elder,” she says, touching the small wrist with its little ribbon marker. “And…Alwyn, I think, for her sister.”

“Good names,” Pod agrees with a smile that fades into a wry grin. “Northern names.”

Brienne shrugs unapologetically. “Northern names, a woman of Tarth for their mother, and a Lannister father. I’m not sure if that means they’ll fit everywhere, or nowhere.”

It’s the first time she’s directly referenced their father out loud to anyone but Tyrion since the day she told Sansa about her pregnancy; she’s pleased to find it’s no longer a twisting wound but instead a comfort, somehow.

“I think they’ll fit just fine, wherever they want to,” says Pod in his simple, easy way, and for now at least Brienne lets herself believe him.

* * *

Pod is a constant presence in the days that follow, more at ease with the twins daily care than Brienne herself is at first; it is he who teaches her how to change them, wind them, sooth them, a parody of their early time together when Brienne had dredged up every bit of training to pass on all she knew of swordplay.

“I was the eldest by a fair way,” he explains simply when Brienne finally asks him about it, three days after the twins birth. “My mother remarried when I was about five or six, and I’ve seven younger sisters, at last count. The girls were all too small to look after each other at first, and Ma was always busy with one or the other, so it fell to me, a lot of the time. It’s why I didn’t leave to squire until I was older. Once Dyna, she’s the sister next to me, was old enough though, I could go then, and was glad of it. I miss the babies though.”

It explains much, and Brienne curses herself anew for never questioning her young squire more on his background and family, the life he had left to become embroiled in the murk of King’s Landing. They make up for it now, however, and Pod spends evenings with one babe or the other in his lap while Brienne nurses her sister, telling her a hundred tales of his childhood and early youth with the army of younger sisters he has left behind.

“I’ll go back and visit them, soon,” he says on one such night, dandling Arta on his knee while Alwyn fusses at her mother’s breast. “They’ll all have grown so big; the younger ones probably won’t even remember me. I’d like for them to see that I did alright, leaving. That it was the right thing to do.”

Neither of them is good with words; Brienne knows that any slight praise she has offered Pod in their time together has been hard earned and long treasured by her young squire. But the shy, plump boy she had unwillingly met on the road outside King’s Landing has grown into a man now, a good and kind one, and still as fiercely loyal, down to his very bones. All the things a knight should be, and maybe she can take a little credit for that but most of it is on him.

“If they are even half as proud of you as I am then they will know it was worth it,” Brienne says sincerely, and can’t help but smile as he ducks his head, ears pink with pleasure.

* * *

And in-between the sleepless nights and long days, Brienne keeps her promise.

_My lord, _the scroll reads in an even hand, _You are an uncle twice over. Arta is the elder; her sister Alwyn followed somewhat unexpectedly a short while later. Lady Sansa has kindly sketched a small likeness for you, which is enclosed. We are all well._

She signs it simply _Brienne,_ familiar, _family,_ and knows he will read it that same way.

* * *

The first year of the twins' lives passes in a haze. The memories of the Long Night and all that followed run deep, but the practicalities of daily life take precedence. Brienne’s silent, crippling worry throughout her pregnancy had been that motherhood would change the fundamentals of who she was, change how the people of Winterfell viewed her and her position, such that the men would no longer follow her and the women would see her only for all the ways in which she failed at their sex. 

It turns out to have been needless. Sansa visits, the evening after the twins’ birth and then most days after that. The first visit she holds each babe in turn and takes her leave with a warm smile and a teasing “You always do excel, Brienne; why produce only one child when two might do?” 

Sansa is freer and more at ease, Brienne finds, in these evening conversations, almost relaxed with a baby to dandle and without a table and a suit of plate armour between them. She never stays long, but always brings a few snippets of information or discussion about the Kingdom or the keep, listens as readily as she ever has to Brienne’s thoughts and thanks her for her advice as she leaves. 

And the rest of the population of Winterfell follow her lead. Her officers still seek her advice and permission on all the same matters they had before, the men are just as ready to listen to her instruction in the training yard, and though the women are inclined to stop and coo over the babies they do not look at Brienne with judgment in their eyes. The first time she leaves the twins with one of Leona’s daughters, some three weeks after their birth, to attend a council meeting, the assembled members greet her with welcome smiles and a smattering of congratulations before turning their attention back to the matters at hand, and she can sit amongst them as equals without comment or expectation. It is _wonderful_.

Even when nearly two hours have passed and the house steward is still locked in argument with the Master of Coin over something so trivial no one else has been able to divert them or intervene, even when her breasts are full and aching against her ill-fitting mail, even as her eyes grow heavy because the room is warm and Alwyn had refused to do anything but nurse for the entirety of the previous night...even then, it is worth it, for the moment when her eye catches Sansa’s and they share a quiet, silent look of mutual frustration, as they have so many times before. 

It would be a lie and a fallacy to say nothing has changed, because it has, in a hundred small ways and two very big ones, but Brienne is beginning to see how change does not always equate to loss. 

Leona’s daughter is delivered of a son some six weeks after the twins’ birth, and is more than willing to take on minding them alongside her own babe in exchange for a few coin. For the first time Brienne is given insight into the hidden secret women’s world that runs in the background of every keep and castle in the kingdom; babies passed around alongside household chores like cooking and laundry, the busy work spread readily through willing hands. She’s not quite a part of it, has nothing to offer in exchange save her coin, but the women still seem to accept her as one of them, balancing her children with work and duties of a different kind, and they welcome her more easily than they would ever have done a more traditional lady. 

Returning to more active duty is easier that she expected as well. She starts slowly, building back up with Pod and a few of the other men she has come to know and trust particularly well, relearning her body all over again, finding new balance, but it doesn’t take long before she is comfortable enough to start training the fresher recruits in person again. 

Tyrion visits when the babies are nearly four months old, allegedly on official court business that is best handled by direction conversation between the Queen in the North and the Queen in the South’s trusted Hand. Given the amount of time Tyrion spends in her rooms admiring his nieces Brienne is privately unconvinced of the urgency of the issue. He and Pod engage in a battle of wills, each determined that his name should be the first full word each twin speaks, and never mind that at less than six moons neither child does more than babble and wave her limbs around. 

But despite the busy days and long nights – because if one child is sleeping, Brienne can be sure her sister won’t be – Brienne still finds there are quiet, silent moments, late at night or in the very earliest hours of the day, when her body is exhausted but her mind can’t rest, and her thoughts turn, traitorous, to Jaime. 

The acute hurt and betrayed humiliation that had shaped her days in the time immediately after his departure has long since passed; was buried deep as soon as she realised her condition, and sealed away for good in the shadow of Moat Cailin with Tyrion’s aid. She cannot – will not – raise her children with any trace of bitterness towards their father dogging in her wake, and so she locks away that night and the ensuing days so well that they become hazy even to herself. 

But that makes it worse, in some ways. Because without the hurt, without the anger, there is just loss, and sadness, and she _misses _him. Not just his touch and his kiss and his warmth in her bed, though those were all desired and sorely lost. She misses _him_, his company, his conversation, for all that it would drive her to distraction. She misses the assurance of his gaze, his absolute belief in her and her abilities, the respect she had carved out from him against his will, and the way she could see herself as viewed through his eyes. _Magnificent_, he’d called her once, in tones of such awe that she had finally been able to let go of the ghosts of all the things she wasn’t. Beauty, grace, fleeting gifts of chance; no, she had earnt his esteem and friendship against his own judgement and despite the handicaps she had been born with, had dragged it out of him kicking and screaming, and it had been all the sweeter for it.

She misses knowing him, as well as she’s ever known anyone in her whole life, and she misses the way he knew her in turn, as no one else ever has. She’d gone so many years without that sort of companionship, far more years without than with, and yet the loss is somehow all the worse for having known it. 

So when Sansa rocks a sleeping child while they discuss the matters of the day, when Pod and Tyrion are competing for the affections of whichever babe is in front of them, when Arta shuffles her padded rear across the floor of their chamber and Alwyn first uses the edge of the bed to pull herself upright…she wants to look over at him and point, proud and gleeful as a child, as if to say “look at this, look at what we’ve done”. Wants to see him smile and laugh and agree in turn.

In all her life she’d never had an equal before; equal in status and skill and stature all. She has Pod, of course, but for all that they have seen and done together there will always be a part of her that still sees him as the young squire he never really was. And though she might go so far as to call Sansa a friend there is too much that separates them in interest and experience for them to be truly equal, the weight of her oath to Lady Catelyn a comfortable but persistent breadth between them. Tyrion is too unknown, still; they might get there, one day, with time and persistence and exposure, but there is no shortcut to that sort of friendship and in the meantime she feels its loss.

Possibly the one who comes closest, these days, is Arya, but she is absent from Winterfell for all of that long year. She returns, quite unexpectedly, during the first Summer Fair, back at Moat Cailin, where she’d left them a full twelve months before. She and Gendry slip in without warning or fanfare, joining the feasting and festivities on the third night, and Brienne does not think it is mere chance that they avoided the more official affair of the previous evening, when the two courts had reaffirmed friendships and vows in formal words and grand gifts. 

It is good to see her, even from a distance; and good to see how Lord Snow spins her round in open joy at her return, how Sansa laughs at their silliness before claiming her own embraces, how even Bran smiles with real feeling to see her again. For all that she understands _why_ the Stark children have scattered far and wide, Brienne can’t help but think how they never seem happier than when they are together again.

Arya seeks Brienne out early the following day. She makes brief noises of distant interest and introduction to the twins before turning, coiled excitement, to their mother.

“I’ve heard you’re back to fighting strength,” the smallest Stark says with a wolf-grin, eager.

“Mostly,” Brienne tempers, amused despite herself. “Though I’m not competing in the melee this year.”

Arya waves this away unconcernedly. “Me either. Not my style. But you’ll spar with me? I’ve learnt some new tricks.”

It is impossible to resist her enthusiasm. Brienne has never seen her so untroubled; this year away has done her good. They find a secluded corner, away from the main arena where the melee and tourneys will take place in coming days. Pod settles in the shade of a nearby tree to watch, a twin on each knee and his own face eager and interested. 

They warm up slowly, testing each other out and relearning their limits, but before long they are throwing themselves at each in sheer joy, Brienne’s size and strength against Arya’s speed and agility. It’s _wonderful;_ there aren’t many who match Brienne in skill, and even fewer who are willing and accessible with any regularity. And those there are come mostly from one school of training and discipline, the same one Ser Goodwin drilled into her as a girl. Arya is the opposite, a mishmash of styles that merge seamlessly into her own unique technique. It is as exhilarating as Brienne remembers from their original days at Winterfell, but better, too, without the looming threat of the Long Night and the more pressing concerns of Littlefinger and his masochisms, watching them at every turn. They are free to push and test themselves for nothing more than the sheer pleasure of finding out just how far they can go.

Brienne doesn’t realise they’ve drawn a crowd until she yields to Arya at the end of a particularly ferocious match, and hears the chatter and cheers. She looks around, blinking in surprise at the mix of Northerners and Southerners who have enfolded them in a loose circle. Pod has been joined by Gendry under the tree; they are both standing now, watching, Arta in Gendry’s arms and Alwyn in Pod’s, and even as Brienne looks on Pod is tossing Gendry a coin, laughing through his feigned displeasure. 

Arya looks suddenly uncertain, even shy – Brienne at least has experience of tourneys, has known this sort of scrutiny, for all that she never enjoyed it. 

“Enough?” Brienne asks levelly, giving the girl an out she knows she won’t take.

“Once more,” counters Arya, refocused. She grins suddenly, fast and wicked. “See if Pod can win his coin back.”

* * *

Sansa calls for her the next day; Brienne is somewhat unsurprised to find Arya already there and waiting when she arrives. 

“I’ve been approached by four houses, so far, on the matter of fostering,” Lady Sansa says evenly, her gaze steady. “I anticipate at least two more over the course of the day.”

Brienne glances over to where Ayra is standing, impassive, besides her. 

“My Lady?” she asks, aware her confusion is bleeding through into her voice and doing nothing to hide it. The twins are too young to be fostered out; Ayra is surely too old. She is at a loss. 

“It seems your exhibition yesterday has garnered a great deal of interest,” Sansa continues. 

Sometimes, just sometimes, Brienne gets a brief glimpse of the relationship the Stark girls had once shared, might still have shared, had time treated them more kindly.

“I can’t believe anyone would be stupid enough to take issue with us sparring,” Ayra says sharply, eyes narrowing in displeasure. “With a Queen in the South and a Queen in the North,”

But Sansa interrupts her, an actual laugh escaping. “Peace, sister. You know that even if anyone were, I would not be so stupid as to pay them any heed,”

And for all that the years have been cruel, taking more from these two women than they had any right, Brienne thinks that here is something to thank them for, this open love and respect where once there would have been only mutual dislike and ready offence.

“It is the opposite, really,” Sansa continues, oblivious to Brienne’s quiet musing. “They are requesting to send their children to foster with us so that they may train with you both.”

Brienne blinks, startled, and even Ayra looks surprised; despite her newfound peace it is still strange to see so many open expressions on her face.

“Assuming you intend to return to Winterfell with us, of course,” Sansa concedes with an uncharacteristic uncertainty as she looks to her sister.

“Yes,” the younger Stark says bluntly. “But. I’m not a knight. Nor do I want to be.”

There is an honesty in her words that was never in Brienne’s when she made the same protest.

Sansa waves away her objection easily. “I’ve been thinking we need to find a proper title for you anyway; First Sword, perhaps? Isn’t that what the Bravossi have?”

“Who is asking, my Lady?” Brienne questions when it becomes apparent Ayra has no response to that.

“Lord Terrick from the Riverlands, for his boy, and the castellan from Acorn Hall, on behalf of the second son there; Lord Smallwood died some two years back, and I understand the Ser Mychel is in charge of the boys until the eldest comes of age. Lady Fossoway offers both her nephew and her steward’s son. And Lord Wendwater asks if we would consider his younger daughter.”

Brienne starts at that and besides her, Ayra’s focus turns sharply to her sister. 

“His daughter?”

“Only the one girl, so far,” agrees Sansa calmly.

“You expect more?”

“I expect that you two could not be the only females ever born to chafe at the limits previously placed on our sex. And I expect that such public demonstrations, not to mention the tales of your deeds during the Wars, will serve to open doors in ways they were not, previously.”

Just for a moment Brienne pictures herself as a girl, nine or ten summers and already aware that she would never fit the space society would expect of her, that the place she would wish to claim for herself was forever barred. If she had then been able then to see another woman, respected, knighted even…and more than that, if she had been given the chance to speak with her, learn from her…

“The world is cruel to little girls,” she says carefully, uncertain of what her own words will be until they’re already leaving her mouth. “Less so now, hopefully, but still. I would like the chance to train them so that they may defend themselves.”

“And the boys?” asks Sansa levelly.

Brienne hesitates, but it is Arya who answers. “Anyone. Anyone who wants to learn. But it has to be anyone, not just the sons and daughter of Lords and highborn families.”

Sansa smiles slightly at the fierceness in Arya’s voice. “I don’t question your reasoning, Ayra, but we have to be practical. There are only two of you, and Winterfell cannot take in every child in the Kingdoms who has a whim for a sword.”

“Then let us choose them,” says Brienne quickly, an idea forming, nebulous. “Now, during the Fair. We can set up a small training ground, spread the word, anyone who wants to is welcome, regardless of name. I’m sure many will lose interest after a short while, when they realise how much work is involved. We can gauge from the remainder who might be suitable.”

Sansa is nodding, her eyes thoughtful.

“This will help you, won’t it?” interrupts Arya suddenly, her voice sharper. “Politically, I mean.”

Sansa doesn’t disassemble. “It will never be a bad thing, to have children of Southern houses trained at Winterfell and loyal to us. And it will be years before Winterfell is in a position to send out fosters of our own. This is a perfect way to keep us as an option on the table in the meantime. But just because an act can be viewed politically doesn’t make it an inherently bad one, Arya.”

Arya waves the last away. “That’s not what I mean. I mean, we’re doing you a favour. I want one in return.”

Sansa looks genuinely surprised; Brienne can feel her own face mirroring the expression. She’s never known the Stark sisters to count favours like that, not between the two of them.

“Not for me. Not exactly.”

Arya’s unusually flustered, so much so that Brienne has to bite back the impulse to ask what’s wrong, knowing Arya won’t appreciate or answer the question. 

“I want Gendry to come to Winterfell with us. And I want you to let him sit in on councils with you. Let him spend time with your steward. That sort of thing. Show him what’s involved with being a Lord. Daenerys wants to legitimise him and give him Storm’s End, but he was a _blacksmith_.”

“Arya…I know you and he are…close…but he’d be better learning his own lands.”

Arya shakes her head furiously. “That won’t work Sansa, you must see it. We talked about it a lot, on the way back here. They’ll either see him as a green interloper and take advantage of him that way, or see him make mistakes and fail to respect him as a result.”

“I was an interloper; Bran should have precedence over me, for all he’s sworn to a higher calling, and I’ve made more mistakes than you seem to think.”

“But that’s different! You’ve been Sansa Stark since the day you were born, and the Northmen know and respect that. They know and respect _you_. Gendry’s never even seen Storm’s End; everything he builds there he’s going to have to earn. At least help him start. Give him a year, find some guise for him to return to Winterfell with us, let him learn, and I’ll train all the fosters you want.” 

“Agreed,” nods Sansa, just like that, and the sister’s exchange a formal handshake that is only somewhat lessened by the grins on both their faces.

* * *

It works better than either Brienne or Arya expect. They neither of them are used to respect in this quarter, but their names and deeds are known widely enough by now that curiosity by far outweighs any scorn. Within a sennight they have established a core group of hopefuls with varying degrees of skill and promise who return daily to train with ready devotion, alongside a larger, ever-fluctuating group of less fervent but still interested children. Brienne is quietly surprised by how invested she becomes in this latter group; they are overwhelming female, often the sisters or cousins or friends of the first group, and she remembers the helplessness of some of the women she met on her travels, their complete inability to protect or defend themselves. Just because they don’t want to dedicate their lives to the art of sword play doesn’t mean they can’t help them. Arya’s skillset is better suited to them than her own, so Brienne mostly watches as the smaller girl teaches them to use their size and surroundings against any larger or better-trained opponent. 

By the end of the Fair they have selected two girls and two boys to return North and spend a year squiring with them, but Brienne finds she is just as proud of the rest, the children returning to their homes just a little more prepared to defend themselves if called to. It is what she would ask for her own daughters, after all.

* * *

Arya is not the only welcome face to return at this year’s fair. Her father leaves Tarth and travels further north than she can remember him ever doing before in her lifetime. And though they have been faithful correspondents, despite wars and ill health and distance between them, though the vows that bind her to Lady Sansa and the North remain more important than almost any other tie, the sight of him after so many years apart, to be able to embrace his familiar frame and see the look on his face when she introduces him to his grandchildren, the future of his House, is one of the happiest moments in a life that is slowly but surely filling with them.

* * *

There is another grand feast, the night before the two royal courts are due to depart. Spring is increasing its grip on the land, especially south as they are, and so the large trestle tables are laid out across the arena floor with huge fires at either end. There is light, and music, and dancing; the champions of the tourneys are celebrated, the unofficial victors of the more subjective competitions that sprang up between the bards and musicians from different houses serenade the assembled companies. Brienne sits with Tyrion and Pod and Bronn, and they drink and laugh, raise toasts with the rest when called upon; to the Queens in the North and South, to a year of peace, to the promise of the coming spring. 

* * *

The following twelve month is gloriously, ridiculously busy. The twins pass their first name day and the world around them starts to open up, and Brienne finds herself thinking longingly of days when she would put one down and return to find her in more or less the same place. As they grow their personalities start to settle; Arta is always just a little more outgoing than her younger sister, Alwyn the first to hesitate and seek reassurance in any new endeavour, but slower too to become frustrated at failure. Their streams of wordless babbles start to settle into more recognisable sounds, until Brienne is reliably greeted with a cry of “mama” after any separation, and Pod finally wins his bet against Tyrion when Alwyn shrieks his name across the room one afternoon. 

She and Arya work with their fosterlings each day, alongside the newest batch of squires and trainees and anyone else who turns up and shows willing. It works better than either of them had expected or imagined. Neither of them had a traditional training, though Brienne’s technique is infinitely more classical than Arya’s, but they both of them are used to learning to read their own strengths and ply them against an opponent’s weakness, and that is a skill infinitely more useful than blindly following a set series of steps and manoeuvres. 

Tyrion visits again, about halfway through the year, not bothering with even the pretence of duty this time, and spends the better part of a month with them. He looks tired and thin to Brienne’s admittedly unpractised eye, but he waves her concerns away when she tries to broach the subject. She lets him be and instead focuses on the things she can help with. She gives him his nieces to care for and play with, spends evening meals with him, Pod joining their conversations more often than not. By the time his departure is looming he is looking happier and more himself again, and Brienne allows herself some small credit for achieving thus.

It doesn’t make it any easier when he approaches her, a sennight before his planned departure, with an expression so grave she is momentarily convinced someone has died.

“I would like to ask Pod to return to King’s Landing with me,” Tyrion says into the quiet of her chambers.

Her heart skips, stops, turns over. It is ridiculous; she is a woman long grown, a knight and a mother besides. And yet the thought of losing Pod from her daily life is akin to someone seizing Oathkeeper and plunging it through her chest. 

“Are you asking my permission?” she delays. “He is an anointed knight of the North and South, not my squire. Nor yours. ”

“I know. But I would like…your blessing, perhaps.”

“Why now?”

Tyrion hesitates, refilling his cup and taking a long drink. “King’s Landing is a different beast, these days. A far safer one, I like to think, and a kinder one too. But it is still the capital, still court, moreso with each passing year as the Houses get themselves back in order.”

“Are you in danger?” Brienne asks sharply, her brow furrowing in concern. She thought they were past this, dammit.

Tyrion rocks a hand back and forth. “Not physically, I don’t think. Nothing so straightforward. But…” He pauses, a heavy sigh. “Varys has his people. The Unsullied and the Dothraki are implacably loyal to the Queen, and by extension Lord Snow, when he is there. Bronn follows his own code and I am not fool enough to put all my trust in it. I have knights and guardsmen and stable boys coming out my ears but I don’t _know_ them; they have lives and families and agendas beyond my own, and I cannot trust them, not entirely. And I find I am…tired, with that.”

Understanding dawns. “Hence Pod.”

“Hence Pod,” agrees Tyrion. “His loyalty to me is matched only by his loyalty to you, and conveniently you are one of the few people in any of these divided kingdoms that I actually wouldn’t mind him spilling my secrets to. Your damn code of honour is a marvellous creature.”

Brienne rather suspects he means that as an insult; she takes it for a compliment all the same.

“I won’t order him,” she hedges, and Tyrion nods in furious agreement.

“I don’t want you to. I want to make him the offer and have him decide for himself what he would do; Seven knows he’s made few enough choices for himself these last few years.”

* * *

Pod says yes, of course, her training and his own innate loyalty too entrenched for it to be otherwise, not when Tyrion’s need is so plain to see. She is quietly, achingly proud of him, but that doesn’t make it any easier. It is only the matter of a few moons before they will meet again at the next Fair, but it is still the longest time she has gone without seeing him since the day Jaime pressed the awkward boy into her unwilling service, and the absence _hurts. _The twins too are miserable, too young to understand the sudden absence of their previously faithful playmate, and it is only when he is gone that Brienne realises how much she relied on him, as a friend and confidante, but also someone she trusts to watch and love her children, as well as all the little day-to-day tasks he saw to on her behalf. 

It is worth it though, for the first glimpse she gets of him at the next Fair, standing tall and assured at Tyrion’s side with Widow’s Wail securely buckled at his hip where she had placed it the day she knighted him, his own man stepped out from any person’s shadow. 

* * *

In the end they go to Tarth a year after that happy reunion, at the end of the third Fair. It’s not a decision she has made so much as accepted, over the past twelve months; the blunt truth is that Sansa just doesn’t need her, anymore, not in the way she had once. Her throne is secure and her Queensguard is filled by men Brienne herself has known and trusted and fought alongside. Bran Stark’s research into the history of the Wall has bought him back to Winterfell, and Jon Snow with him, making up for the loss of Arya, once more travelling across lands unknown and torn between Storms End and Winterfell when she returns. Winterfell is emerging, slowly but surely, shaking off the death and destruction of the wars and stepping into a new age as surely as spring is spreading through the land even this far North. 

Ser Brienne, Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, would have happily spent her life there all the same, sacrificed it willingly if called upon and otherwise seen out her years watching over her Lady’s side. It would have been a good life, and an honourable one, and Brienne suspects there is always a part of herself that will mourn its loss. 

But Brienne, Maid of Tarth, has duties that lie elsewhere, and she cannot ignore them forever.

* * *

It still feels strange, to turn south from Moat Cailin; further south than she has travelled in years. Spring is more apparent here, the grass growing lush and green, the days warmer than she remembers being in what feels like a lifetime. The twins, acclimatised to a Northern winter, are over -hot and crotchety with it, despite the welcome return of Pod to their daily lives, and all in all it is nothing short of a relief to reach King’s Landing and board the ship that will bear them home. Parting from Tyrion and Pod is more sweet than bitter, this time; they at least will be close enough that they have reasonable hope of seeing each other sooner than the next year, and though Arta clings to Tyiron and Alwyn sniffles into Pod’s cloak, they are used to these partings by now. 

The boat, by contrast to the long slow miserable ride, is nothing but an adventure for two small children, the cooler sea air and the space to roam a welcome relief after days on horseback and shut up in a wagon. Their last day at sea Brienne goes against her better judgment just once and wakes them both in the early morning, taking them up onto the top deck to watch Tarth emerge before them in the dawn; they won’t remember, she knows, but she will treasure this quiet hour, the three of them wrapped up together against the morning chill, the first glimpse of the place that has forever and always been her home. 

She left with no real expectation to ever return. Death in defence of her king was the noblest end she could think of, then as now, and it had felt like a release, at the time, an escape from the expectations and requirements of her position in a way that would also free her father to find another, more fitting heir. 

Instead she returns an anointed Knight of Westeros, bearing formal words of allegiance and friendship from the Queen in the North in her pack and holding the future of her line securely in her arms. Her heart has hollowed and shattered and forged anew, expanded to accommodate the gifts left in her care by those she has lost. Sansa and Arya, from Lady Catelyn. Pod, Tyrion, Arta and Alwyn, from Jaime. 

As a child she had dreamed of a life of heroics and adventure; as an adolescent she had resigned herself to one of boredom and torment. She had never known to even dream of such a welcome compromise.

Arta fidgets in her arms, always the first to tire of inactivity where her sister could stay content, snuggled safe and warm under her cloak. 

“Have I ever told you about how I met your father?” she asks the girls quietly, knowing she hasn’t but needing to voice the question all the same. Arta shakes her head vigorously, curls flying, while Alwyn shrugs sleepily into her tunic. They’re too young, really, Brienne knows; they won’t remember, they don’t even really understand what it is to have or not have a father, their lives too lacking in comparisons for them to realise their own loss as yet.

It doesn’t matter; she wants, _needs_ them to know, suddenly, and maybe it’s better like this, that he becomes a familiar tale so entrenched in their lives that they never have to question or wonder. 

She sits down amongst some folded rigging where they can still see the Isle growing ever-larger over the ships rail, and pulls them both onto her lap.

“During the Wars, Lady Sansa had been captured by his family, and her brother Robb had captured your father. Lady Catelyn, who was Sansa’s mother, asked me to take your father south, to where Sansa was, and exchange him for her. We had to be very sneaky and quiet…”

The twins doze, warm and sleep-heavy in her arms, as Brienne’s words walk them the length of Westeros and back again and the ship rocks in the gentle waves of the Straits, bearing them all three safely home.

* * *

**Epilogue – Tarth, nearly two years later...**

* * *

Tyrion and Pod are not infrequent guests at Evenfall, but still, Brienne can’t help but feel there is something odd about this sudden visit. Tyrion is cagey, almost jumpy, gregarious one moment and withdrawn the next. 

“There are rumours,” Tyrion says quietly when she finally broaches it with him, a few days into their stay. His eyes are fixed on the girls, teaching Pod the intricate rules of some game of their own devising at the far end of the sunlit meadow where they have spent the afternoon playing and picnicking and generally enjoying the high spring weather, but Brienne gets the impression that his focus is wholly on her.

“Rumours?” prompts Brienne when he fails to continue.

“Rumours,” repeats Tyrion, turning to face her full on; she is sitting and he standing and so they are almost of a height, for once. “From the ports, mostly. Out of Essos. Around the fringes of Slaver’s Bay. The details are inconsistent at best, but the gist is…solid, so far.”

Brienne watches his face carefully as he speaks. These days she knows it as well as she knows her own children. She has seen him in grief and despair and anger, has seen his joy in time spent with his nieces, his satisfaction with the ongoing efforts of the Small Council, his mirth at riling Pod. 

She has never seen such ragged, desperate hope before. 

“And what are they solid about?” she has to ask, because there’s only one thing she can imagine that would put such an expression on Tyrion’s face, but if she speaks it and she’s wrong then there is no recovering. 

“It might be nothing. It likely _is _nothing. But… They say…they tell of a Westerosi man, late of the wars. He is travelling East to escape them, or West to return and reclaim lands that were stolen from him. He is tall or short, dark haired or fair, but in every iteration Varys birds have found he has only one hand, and some…some claim he was pulled from below King’s Landing on the day the Red Keep fell.”

There is a long, pregnant pause. 

“There must be many one-handed men,” Brienne says eventually, her voice tight. “It’s a common enough punishment for theft, or rape.”

“We’re clearing deeper into the tunnels with every passing year,” Tyrion counters, an edge of urgency in his tone; she can see how desperate his own will to believe is. “Some of them we’re completely through. There’s been no trace of him.”

“Then he burnt when the caches blew. Those bodies were beyond recognition.”

“Maybe,” Tyrion allows. “Maybe I’m a fool for hoping. But maybe he didn’t, maybe he got out, and got away, and maybe he’s _still alive_ out there, somewhere.”

“Then why isn’t he _here_?” snaps Brienne, years of buried grief and pain lashing through. 

“I don’t know,” falters Tyrion, the eagerness in his face dimming. “I don’t know. And probably you’re right, and I’m a sentimental dupe, and it’s all nonsense anyway. But…if there’s a chance. A tiny chance, but a chance…I owe it to him to be sure. And I think you do too.”

Brienne sits in silence for a long moment. She knows Tyrion is playing her, pulling on the strings of the oaths and loyalties that bind her. He at least has the decency to be blatant about it; leaves it up to her whether she calls him out on his manipulations or gives in to them. 

Across the field the girls have abandoned their previous game, and now Arta splashes and laughs in the small stream, swinging on the end of Pod’s arm, while Alwyn is crouched on the water’s edge a short distance away, studying whichever rock or small creature has caught her eye. It terrifies her, some days, the depth of the love she feels for these two tiny fragile souls; across the years that divide them she remembers Lady Catelyn’s doomed devotion to her own children and finally understands it. 

Her first instinct is to run, hide, take her children and shield them from the mad path that Tyrion wants to peer down. These days, when she thinks of Jaime, it is mostly in relation to the physical evidence he has left behind, the markers he has sunk deep into every corner of her life. She feels Oathkeeper’s hilt under her palm and the heft of her armour, and thinks of him. She laughs with Tyrion and spars with Pod and thinks of him. She raises their daughters, sees him in their faces more and more with each passing year, teaches them their letters and sword play in turn, and wonders what he would think of them. He is everywhere, and yet it’s been years since she’s had to face her own feelings directly, that small secure chamber somewhere behind her ribcage where she packed away the ugly mess of grief and love and abandonment in the early days after Jaime’s departure. She’s not sure she can do it, allow herself to believe with the same hope she can hear in Tyrion’s voice, unpick that lock only to have it all be for nothing. 

Or to find that he is out there, somewhere, alive and well and having chosen not to come back to them...

But no. Losing him once was unbearable, and yet she somehow found the strength to bear it. She can learn to carry this too, if she needs to.

If he is out there, she owes it to him to be sure. Owes him for Vago Hoat and Harrenhall, owes him for Oathkeeper and Pod and Lady Sansa’s life. Owes him for Tyrion’s continuing presence in her life, owes him most of all for their children, that last and greatest gift he never knew of. Owes him for all the ways in which her life is so much better, now, than it ever could have been had his not collided with it. 

So yes, she owes him. To be sure that he is safe, well and unharmed, happy in whatever life he has chosen to forge for himself. She managed to make peace with his choice to leave; if comes to it, she can make peace with his choice not to return.

“Alright,” she’s says at last. Tyrion’s eyes are deep, knowing, as if he can guess at the seismic shifting of her thoughts. “Yes. You’re right. Where do you think we should start?”

**Author's Note:**

> I have lots of headcanons for this ‘verse that just didn’t fit into a story focused so tightly on Brienne and her immediate surroundings – so if there’s anything that doesn’t make sense please ask, because it’s probably something that’s become so entrenched in the universe to me that I’ve taken it as a given everyone else will somehow just know it too.
> 
> Part two is plotted through but far from ready for posting, so although I promise it will come I wouldn’t like to give false hope as to when.


End file.
